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Recent efforts to make undergraduate biology more inclusive include developing content that explores how human values and priorities impact science, and previous work documents how instructors value an “ideologically aware” biology curriculum that highlights these themes. Here, we surveyed a national sample of undergraduate students in biology classes to explore student perceptions of Ideological Awareness via a mixed-methods investigation. Through quantitative analyses, we found that women students, transgender or gender nonconforming students, and students majoring in biology or another science field were more likely to support the inclusion of Ideological Awareness in the biology classroom. We used expectancy value theory to guide our qualitative interpretations of student survey responses. Specifically, students’ expectancy of success and the intrinsic value they attach to ideologically aware content influenced their overall acceptance and advocacy for its integration into the curriculum. Students reported valuing Ideological Awareness because it can increase awareness and decrease biases. The most frequently cited cost was the potential for Ideological Awareness to elicit negative emotions. We compared results with similar or identical questions on a national survey distributed to biology instructors, which showed general alignment between students and instructors. These results support the incorporation of Ideological Awareness in biology education, emphasizing the need for more research on the implementation of inclusive content to address potential challenges. 

Recent research has begun to explore the experiences of Christian undergraduates and faculty in biology to illuminate reasons for their underrepresentation. In this study, we focused on the experiences of graduate students and explored Christianity as a concealable stigmatized identity (CSI) in the biology community. We constructed interview questions using this CSI framework, which originates in social psychology, to research the experiences of those with stigmatized identities that could be hidden. We analyzed interviews from 33 Christian graduate students who were enrolled in biology programs and found that many Christian graduate students believe the biology community holds strong negative stereotypes against Christians and worry those negative stereotypes will be applied to them as individuals. We found that students conceal their Christian identities to avoid negative stereotypes and reveal their identities to counteract negative stereotypes. Despite these experiences, students recognize their value as boundary spanners between the majority secular scientific community and majority Christian public. Finally, we found that Christian students report that other identities they have, including ethnicity, gender, nationality, and LGBTQ+ identities, can either increase or decrease the relevance of their Christian identities within the biology community.